About the speaker

Leore Spira is the Head of Revenue Operations at Buildots, a construction management tech company. She’s also a panel advisor for the rev ops function for Ibex Investors. She also co-founded and is the community leader of The OptimiZers Community. In our conversation with Leore, we talk about the power of connecting with others in the revenue operations community.

Building Up the Revenue Operations Community

Leore: I’ve been a revenue operations leader and expert for quite a while. I established two departments and several startups and I co-founded The OptimiZers Community, the Israeli Community for Operations Leaders, almost two years ago. 

And I did it, by the way, just because when I became involved in revenue operations, or when I started my career as a sales operations, I felt that I’m a lone wolf. Not just in the company, but also in the ecosystem. I felt that I wanted to learn more. I’m eager to learn more. I have so many ideas. I have so many things I want to share with other people and I have no one to do that with. Not because I didn’t believe that there are no sales ops, rev ops, or any kind of ops functions at Israeli or global companies, just because nobody ever introduced himself or herself, as that.

Therefore, I just felt that maybe I need to create something and build a community. Or just gather some people to a specific platform, just to start a conversation. It can be about operations. It can be about strategy. It can be about tech stack and tools. It can be about even feelings and frustration that we have working with the go-to-market leaders.

I guess this is how it happens. I met two amazing women and together, we founded the community. At some point also revenue operations has become more of, I would say, an interesting and intriguing buzzword and not just a rumor that everybody spoke about. What are rev ops? What are revenue operations? What are go-to-market operations? We’re transitioning from sales ops to something else. And I think this community came, especially during the COVID, when we were stuck at home, we were quarantined and we worked with our computers only. And we didn’t even interact with people.

So, I think this was basically the catalyst of pushing us to actually found the community because this was the time. Because this was the time that we could have the feeling that we are not alone, that something is happening. There is a new trend. We’re transitioning to a new era of processes, strategies, startups. I guess at some point they realized that we’re shifting to a new mindset and there is a new transformation within the company. And I think it was a great opportunity to also interact and network with global revenue operations or operations leaders at other companies.

This gave me the push to find a solution for us leaders to interact with them. With colleagues, globally, and that is why I’m working also on founding the global, the OptimiZers Community on LinkedIn to bring us Israelis together with Americans, Europeans, and Africans. Everyone that feels they have so much information and so many best practices to share in the operations functions.

And I think it’s a great opportunity also, for us as Israelis to interact with other people and see how people across the globe actually build their go-to-market process, the customer journey, the lead to cash strategy, et cetera.

Barry: That’s really cool that you started that. I’ve seen the importance of community growth, not just in rev ops, but in every function. Even functions that have been around for a while, like marketing. Dave Gerhardt, just left Drift because he has such a strong community that he built himself, for example. I’m not saying Buildots should be worried that you’re going to leave.

Leore: No.

Barry: That’s pretty interesting. So, definitely the power of community, people are hungry to learn. People are eager to share, which is nice. Personally, this is what I’ve been saying. And actually, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. I’ve been seeing this transformation of this, Gary V. kind of hustle culture, where in order to succeed, you have to hustle. You have to work at night. It’s about grit and that’s it.

And now I feel like it’s more about helping people and being more human. Not that Gary V. was against being human or against helping people, but I think his number one thing was hustle and people were eating that up, just three years ago, a lot more than they are now. And now I see people just eating up the idea of just sharing is caring. Do you see a similar pattern?

The Evolution of the Revenue Operations Function

Leore: Of course, of course. Well, I have more than 10 years of experience at high tech companies and at other companies, as well as sales ops, and I started my career in marketing. And I see that, well, especially during COVID, any operations function or job position that was open at companies before COVID didn’t get as much attention because management focuses on positions like marketing and sales, because they bring the money.

They bring the dollars to the company. They work on brand awareness. They promote the company externally. And for us, operations, what we do, especially rev ops, we work with the go-to-market departments. We help them to build a revenue machine, a scalable revenue machine. We help them to become more productive and efficient, but eventually, we work internally.

And I guess that we didn’t get as much attention as we should have before COVID, but once companies changed their mindset and shifted the focus from not just sales and marketing. And you can see that, by the way, on customer success. Customer success, the function started a few years ago, but it didn’t get a lot of attention. Then the mindset was changed or shifted from sales and from generating leads into a customer journey process.

Revenue operations didn’t even exist, by the way, at all. It was either sales operations, marketing operations, and then customer success operations. If companies really saw a necessity to actually build this function or just pushed into support, just because this is what they knew. They didn’t think about the customer journey, the buyer, the client, the onboarding process. They thought about the money.

They need to make the sale. They need to generate the leads to generate more sales and opportunities. And nobody really gave much attention to the customer, to the end customer. And the customer experience, after they purchased the solution. So, I think once that mindset was actually shifted to the customer journey, then revenue operations could transition from just a buzzword into an actual important and critical function. Because if you work with sales operations, marketing operations, and customer success operations, you still work in silos. You are avoiding building a holistic process where most of the important milestones are the handshakes and the handovers. And therefore, there is a lot of friction and once a company’s mindset or strategies were shifted into the customer journey, then revenue operations arose.

And we could not just build the holistic process, we could also, actually, maintain the rhythm and the conversation and communication between each department. And by the way, not only sales marketing and customer successes go to market. We could also involve R&D. We could involve product. We can also make sure that other departments that are important and that work at the company, actually understand and have the information and the data about the customer to make them a happier customer or support them in time of need.

And, yes, I think revenue operations, it’s a trend. It’s a really cool and sexy buzzword. I think everybody’s talking about it. Maybe not all companies really understand what we are actually doing and why technology, process, and strategy must be together at one place and one function to actually make sure that we have a holistic process.

But, we will get there, I think, and we are starting to see this again. This is why I founded the community because I wanted not just operations leaders to get together and be at one place, have one professional hub. I also wanted to bring CEOs, COOs, and anyone that can benefit from the discussion because what we’re doing is we’re talking professionally. We are sharing best practices. We’re sharing information. We are sharing experiences. And we’re asking questions. And I think this can be beneficial, not just to operations functions, but also to management and other leaders. Because again, it’s relevant to all of us.

The Growth of the Revenue Operations Community

Barry: So, let’s talk more about the revenue operations community. How many people are in the Tel Aviv rev ops community. Do you have a guesstimate?

Leore: Well, rev ops is new. So, in regards to statistics, I don’t think we have as many revenue operations experts here in Israel, but hopefully, in the next few years, we will see more and more. But, we do have, at least we have right now within the community, almost 2,000 members.

Barry: Oh, amazing.

Leore: Yeah. That comes from operation positions. If it’s revenue operations, business operations, product operations, customer success operations, sales operations, marketing operations, engineering operations. A lot of operations. We also see C-level and VP’s that come from go-to-market departments or relevant teams that can benefit from our discussions. And again, this is a professional community, it’s a professional hub. We were recognized by Startup Nation, recently, as a professional hub because we are promoting professional discussions. We are encouraging people to speak in the community.

We are not allowed, by the way, to have a comment, like write me a message, let’s talk about this offline. Because we do believe sharing is caring. We do believe, and this is something that I’m forcing myself by the way, with the members, because I really want us to feel secure and to feel that we can raise any kind of professional question that is related to our day to day or best practices or processes and strategies that we want to translate and execute into tools and technology.

I think what I really love about this community is we’ve not just managed to bring all of us lonely wolves to one platform. We’re also starting to speak with one another, to share ideas, to share recommendations, to share any kind of a problem, a dilemma. Anything that comes to their mind just because they feel safe to do that. And they feel safe and they feel now that they have someone to speak with and they’re not alone. They have someone that feels the same way they did or they do for the first time.

Also, I felt that I have people that actually feel and experience the frustration that I have sometimes during my job or my day-to-day tasks because I’m like them. Sometimes I don’t have a team. Sometimes we just join companies as the first position and then we grow step by step with the company. And sometimes it’s very frustrating and you have nobody to speak with. So, in some way, we also provide free therapy.

Barry: Yeah. Very cheap therapy.

Leore: Cheap therapy to one another. Yeah. But, I think it’s beneficial for all of us.

Common Issues in the RevOps Community

Barry: So, tell me some patterns that you see in this community. It’s been going on for two years, it’s 2,000 people. What question do you keep on seeing coming up? What dilemma do you see keep on coming up? I know people have the search functionality, but maybe people still ask the same type of questions. Do you see any patterns?

Leore: Yeah. So, we have a lot of questions about tools, about solutions that can solve any kind of pain or use case that they’re feeling. So, we have a lot of questions about that and I think most of us share our experience with tools that they work with in their current companies or previous ones. Sometimes we change. Sometimes we keep working with the same tool at different companies. So, I think we see that a lot.

Also, we are sharing a lot of best practices. So, it depends on the company model, but if it’s a B2B or B2C, for example, usually the process is really the same. But, each company has its own tweaks that they implement in order to measure and understand more about the process. We have a lot of dilemmas or best practices sharing that we see in the community.

I also see a lot of questions about the yearly plans. Usually, what happened in the past is that we were hired as a single function at the company. We supported a lot of teams. We provided a lot of services and we supported, not just the teams, but also management and leadership. But, we never had one responsibility that was under us. And we didn’t build a yearly plan or a budget or we didn’t even manage a team and things like that. And I can see right now that companies actually understand not just the importance of the function, but also that we cannot be a one-man or one-woman show. I’m trying to support the community members because I have the experience to actually build this plan this year at Buildots, but we don’t have templates.

And we don’t have experience in actually building a revenue operations team or business operations team from scratch. And I think that it’s interesting because even for companies now, management understands that this team should be more centralized and we should include some functions that some companies in the past divided into different departments. And we see how this position has transitioned from a one-man or one-woman show to a team. And it’s a struggle and we have a lot of discussions about this and how colleagues see that, how their function actually operates at the company, sharing different points of view, experience, et cetera.

Revenue Operations Tools and Tech Stack

Barry: Absolutely. So, let’s even go deeper into some of those points. So, we have the first point: people ask a lot about tools. Can you be more specific about that? What revenue operations tools are they looking for? What are they wanting to accomplish?

Leore: Well, it depends. Some of them know how they want to plan and build their tech stack based on the different teams. So, from experience, of course, some of us know which tools are a must-have for sales, marketing, and customer success. Some of us don’t. So, we do ask about not just a specific tool, but usually, it comes from having a problem. We have a use case. How do you suggest solving this with technology? And since revenue operations is responsible, not just to build processes, but to translate strategies or improve strategies together with the go-to-market teams. We also support the teams in building a scalable tech stack. So, we evaluate tools. We bring them to the table. We hear and discuss these pains with the managers and the team members themselves.

In the community, we’re not just asking about a specific tool, but we just want to get advice. How would we support it? Which tools do you recommend to solve this problem, this problem, or this problem? And you can see that all of us had various experiences. And we tried a lot of tools during our careers. So, everyone can get one or two or even three tools that they can check out and build a use case based on what they’re experiencing in their company.

Sharing RevOps Best Practices

Barry: And templates or best practices are people looking for the most? 

Leore: I think now that all of us are transitioning to building a customer journey process, it would be more of a sharing best practices about the lead to cash process. About how to manage sales in the most effective way. So, they would provide information that can, later on, be very, very useful, not just to customer success, but also for the product and R&D team. I guess we have a lot of best practices that are shared in regards to support and how we can use the technical processes of the technical teams to support the business units as well.

So, how we can benefit from support tickets, for example, best practices that we built to actually create features and create solutions in-house in regards to customer health, score, and lead to cash strategy. So, actually, now we understand, by the way, that we are all connected. So, if we have several operations departments, we shouldn’t be separated because their best practices to their colleagues in similar positions can also be very useful to other operations functions.

How to Connect With Other RevOps Professionals

Barry: What advice would you give to people who want to connect with other rev ops professionals in their neighborhoods or in their city?

Leore: First of all, I have to say that in the U.S., they’re much more advanced than us in Israel. So, they have a lot of best practices and insights to share with us, the Israelis. But, my best advice would be to network. Try to find people around you, sit around a table, and share ideas. This is, again, how we started. Share your ideas, even schedule an open Zoom session to speak about your struggles, to speak about use cases, to speak about pains. And pain can be not just a professional pain, but also personal.

I think one of the first round tables that we did before we actually founded the community was we scheduled an open Zoom and some people came and we shared frustration. We shared that we feel alone. We share that we are pushing for a lot of processes and we can see the data and we can see the insights that we can provide, but we are all alone. We don’t have support. We don’t have a team. We have a lot on our plate and it’s frustrating. And it’s overwhelming.

And I guess, try to convert yourself from a lone wolf to a team. Another team in-house, like a small family of revenue operations experts and leaders or even people that want to be experts. Join together and speak about it, talk about it, share ideas. I think we can all learn from one another and we can also teach ourselves more and make sure that we are taking what we know and we can take it now to the next level, just from listening to other people.

So, it’s something that’s super important, especially in these times when not all of us go to the office. And it’s nice to know someone that knows exactly how you feel and knows exactly what your problems are or dilemmas. And maybe sometimes I can give you good advice. It’s like having a good friend, but professionally good ones. So, it’s really nice.

Barry: Absolutely. I can relate. I’m not in revenue operations. But, daily, I speak with people in revenue operations, and I can relate a hundred percent. So, I think that’s great advice for everyone listening at home or on the road. How to network and the power of networking. Go to Facebook groups and Slack communities and network with people. It could be cold messaging them if you find out that they’re in the same city. It could be tweeting them, LinkedIn messaging, Facebook. The world is our oyster.